Google: We Do Take Action On Rich Snippet Spam

Google hosted a special hangout with John Mueller and a colleague from the Dublin office who works on structured data and rich snippets. During the hangout, at the 43:50 minute mark, Google addressed a question about rich snippet spam not being removed even after repeated spam reports.

Google said that they do review all rich snippet spam reports, just like they do for normal spam reports. And if there is a clear violation, Google does take action. Sometimes there is not a clear violation, so no action is taken. In short, if you see rich snippet spam and you report it and nothing it taken off, then it might not be in violation.

Here is what the Googler said:

I've seen a lot of [rich snippet] spam reports and in my experience, like we differently, whenever it's clearly a violation of our guidelines we definitely take action. So it's not like they get lost or it's not like nobody looks at them. They actually getting you at a very regularly.

And essentially are also for our team and are extremely important, like, a source of finding out about of ways how people are either intentionally or maybe accidentally doing stuff that might be a bit a beyond our guidelines. And definitely, let's say if if you find certain spam reports and you still are really strongly believing that there's something wrong and you see nothing is happening that would also be an interesting case, maybe to flag on the webmaster forum. You just bring it to our attention again so we can have another see what was happening.